Abstract

Following some trends of the contemporary capitalism in developed countries, some authors have recently outlined some future pessimistic scenarios about the trend of economic growth and wage share and the characteristics of the earnings distribution. The aim of this paper is to assess how the different types of pension systems can allow to deal with some possible negative scenarios, investigating in particular how to find the resources needed to finance pension expenditure in the presence of macroeconomic stagnation and how to arrange the pension rules in a labor market characterized by extreme inequality. After recalling the capacity of the main features of pension systems to protect the participants from different types of individual and systemic risks, in the paper it is then assessed how pension schemes could cope with serious macroeconomic and distributive contexts.